Shade
by Akazukin Elle
Summary: She's a traitor inside her own skin.


SHADE  
  
  
  
The scents and sounds of camp life  
Surround her, burrowing deep into  
The disrupted, chilled night air  
Like weeds between the cracks;  
They itch but are not soothed  
And crawl beneath, sheathed  
In subterfuge.  
She hears the fire spark and  
Sees the brightcold spots of flame  
Jump to the washed-out sky overhead  
Only to fade far from it,  
Brought down by the weight  
Of grief, of hunger,  
Of tower searchlights, which gleam  
On chain-link fences.  
The taste of stale water  
Lingers on her lips like gasoline  
And she knows that the taste,  
Like the fire and the stars,  
Is not hers to know,  
Clung to by the  
Seas and seeds of disease  
Which she has never faced.  
Men's voices rise and fall  
Like sparkfire to the stars  
And she can hear the bass and tenor  
Weave of long singsong journeys;  
The journeys are etched indelibly  
Into the soles of her untested feet  
By gravel, by glass, and by  
Other things that   
She has not yet known.  
They speak of days  
Long-forgotten, days that she  
Remembers through restless dreams  
And sudden flashes of silence in  
Classrooms and hallways and showers.  
She runs like a fugitive  
Across the slant of the landscape  
And her feet hit the curved ground  
That they saw  
But did not touch;  
She tresspasses lightly,  
Barely touching the burnt brown grass,  
Barely seeing the long shower lineups,  
Barely remembering the last of her  
History classes, and maybe   
That's for the best.  
And her fingers take the texture of  
Smoke and poison in the air,  
To store in her encyclopaedia of  
Unwilling isolation  
In which she compares the  
Rough first-kiss lips to  
Chapped skin in the  
Bitter winter.  
New concrete and ceramic tile  
Press coldly into her aching ribs,  
And she tastes hatred for the first time:  
It is the taste of stale water  
And week-old bread  
And smoke in the night's sharp air;  
It is a needle against her elbow,  
A cut-off scream from the other side  
Of the fence,  
It is the three-part choir  
Of grown-up men in her mind  
That she cannot escape, even  
In dreams.  
Auschwitz occupies her.  
The barbed-wire fences bend  
If she thinks too long and too hard;  
But to bend the barbed-wire fences  
Is not to escape;  
The bruises running down her  
Little-boy's jaw are  
Ample proof of that.  
This is no hero's journey.  
Her crimes climb her arms  
Crossing the skin, invisible scars that  
Creep under the leather,  
Veins that stand out,  
Trophies of her conquests.  
Treason tracks her  
Wherever she goes, enclosing  
Her fingers one by one:  
She is a stranger in a  
Strange man's head, or he in hers;  
The difference is too thin to tell,  
And it stretches across her crowded mind,  
Like leather, or  
A Nazi lampshade, casting  
Light on a smoky room that she  
watches from outside, rain soaking  
Her short dark hair.  
There is a price for her crimes;  
A very high price indeed  
For a flash of white skin  
From beneath the whisper of  
Smooth satin, or even for  
A show of hands in the morning  
To guard what is not hers  
From escape.  
Yes, a price.  
A gold filling dropped into an  
Outstretched hand's callouses,  
A shovel thrust into dry earth,  
Frustrated with salted soil,  
Or even, if she's seen it right,  
That very fine piece of  
Jewish linen --  
It eludes her.  
She pays.  
For every breath that they  
Do not take, suffocated  
By their faceless newfound poverty,  
She pays.  
For every day she does not own that  
Rises unbidden when she closes her eyes,  
For all those years lived  
And lost before her birth,   
She pays.  
But especially for every childhood fancy  
That she dreams she  
Might once have   
Dreamed, long ago --  
She pays, she pays, she pays.   
  
  
  
FIN  
  
  
  
NOTES  
1. Nazi lampshades -- were made out of the skin of Jewish concentration camp victims.  
2. Jewish linen -- the death shroud.  
3. This was highly experimental; I wanted to write Rogue and her voices, but figuring out how without being boring was a challenge. I'm kind of fond of this piece, but I would adore some feedback on this.  
4. This piece is available in pretty HTML on my website, along with my other work -- http://imprimeur.pyrefly.ca -- so if you'd prefer to check stuff out there, go for it.  
  
Thanks!  
  
-elle 


End file.
